I read the following statment which followed the very intelligent description of how the life boats, rafts, and chute would be launched in case of emergency. "Then look around next time you are tendered ashore. That tender boat - as a life saving craft - is rated to hold 150 people. But with the enormous size of many of today's cruise passengers, we are rarely able to squeeze more than 75 of them into a tender boat. There is no way - under any circumstances - that we will be able to fit 150 of them into a life boat in a real emergency. We might be able to jam 100 large bodies into those boats. But where are we going to put the other 50 people assigned to the boat???
You can complain about the dangers of smoking all you want - and I agree with you.
But more pressing is the need to put cruise passengers on a serious diet to allow us to save their lives when the next ship is sinking."

I am in agreement with you about the problem of obsesity. I also feel that a lot of cruisers, cruise for the food and your cries will go unheeded.

To expand upon your point about lifeboat capacity. I have been on the life boats used to tender cruisers seated on benches and jammed in like a New York subway.

I have been on one of the newer cruise ships and I observed the design of the seating which will require about half of the people to get up on table top level seats that are arranged to maximize capacity. Those people better have pretty good mobility to get to and up on the seats. I really think that safety instructions should be expanded to include instructions concerning boarding the lifeboats.